Keyword Research and Targeting Without Exact Match - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Whatever the motives behind Google's recent removal of exact-match keyword targeting from AdWords, the resulting uncertainty makes keyword research that much more difficult. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the implications of the change, and offers tips for the most effective research going forward.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about keyword research and the challenge that's being presented with the loss of exact match bidding capabilities inside of Google's AdWords platform.

AdWords has sort of become a keyword research and opportunity tool of choice for SEO and, of course, PPC folks for a decade now. We've always had some optionality around how we choose keywords inside of AdWords.

Say I was selling groceries online. Maybe I'm selling Asian groceries online and, specifically, fish sauce, and I want to do some modifications to which terms and phrases I bid on. So I could use things like these brackets to say exact match only, bid on keywords that are precisely fish sauce, no modifiers, no changes, not fishes sauce, not fish sauces, not Vietnamese fish sauce. I just want the word fish sauce. Or I could go with a partial phrase match, meaning no modifications to this part of the phrase, but yes if it's Vietnamese fish sauce or fish sauce recipes, that's fine. Or I could go fish sauce broad match and then let Google sort of extrapolate out and add all sorts of things on there.

Now, as of September of 2014, Google AdWords is making a change to their policy. All campaigns and keywords that you employ inside campaigns must use close variance. Essentially, they're removing the exact match and saying, "Hey, we don't think this power tool is useful, and that control is going to be lost to folks."

There are two ways to look at this. One is Google took down their plaque on the wall that said "Do no evil" and put up a plaque that said "Be kind of evil when it makes us more money." That is one perspective.

As many folks have pointed out, including Larry Kim from WordStream, many, many campaigns, in fact a vast majority of campaigns that are integrated with WordStream he noted, don't even actually use exact match in this format. So maybe they're not losing all that much, and Google is just saying, "Hey, this is a very tight feature, and we're worried about how small businesses and people who are bidding might be employing it. Not all the users who are using it are power users. People are getting confused. So we're taking away that functionality."

My guess is the truth is probably somewhere in between. This will almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of more revenue for Google, because a lot more people will be bidding on terms and phrases that perhaps they should be bidding on and really want and perhaps they didn't intend to bid on and don't particularly want.

In any case, it loses some of that fine control. That's very frustrating for PPC folks, but it can also be frustrating for us SEO folks. Now, we honestly don't know. We don't have data. It'll be pretty interesting to see whether in September this changes.

If you go to Google's Keyword Planner today inside of AdWords -- which is free by the way, you just need to sign in with a Google account -- you can do a search term like "fish sauce" and it'll return a bunch of things. I did a search for fish sauce, and it returned for me things like fish sauce, average monthly searches 22,200, competition low. This is not competition for SEO, by the way. You can get that from something like Moz's Keyword Difficulty Score. This is competition in AdWords itself -- how many people are bidding, how aggressively they're bidding, that sort of thing.

Then, it suggests other things like Thai fish sauce, fish sauce substitute, vegan fish sauce -- I don't think that's going to work -- sauces for fish. Sauces for fish? Are you kidding me? I understand that technically has the words sauce and fish in it, but that has an entirely different meaning. It's sort of odd that they're showing that to me. Then, they give me the search volume for all these and this kind of thing.

What we don't know is whether these are exact, partial, phrase match, broad match. My guess is they're broad match, whether they include those close variance or don't include them, the number.

It's been kind of tough. It'll be very interesting to see if, when this shift happens in September, a lot of these numbers change dramatically, and we're seeing like oh, yeah, Google was showing me more specific exact data previously for these terms, and now they're showing broader numbers for each of these, or whether that's already the case today. I suspect it's actually already the case today, and it's been a while, a couple of years, since Google actually offered truer, closer to reality numbers around what these are.

I think these numbers probably include a lot of close variance and potentially even some broad case matches. For example, fish sauce, this 22,000 number might actually include sauces for fish right in there. This makes keyword research really tough, really hard.

For us in SEO, the lost ability makes it a lot more difficult. The bidding situation in AdWords makes it a lot more difficult to determine keyword performance, and keyword performance is something that's critical to us. That tells us when someone searches for "Thai fish sauce," they're much more likely to buy from us, or when they search for a particular brand of fish sauce they're much more likely to buy from us, versus the broad phrase
"fish sauce."

That's pretty frustrating, because we often use AdWords data, PPC data to say, "Hey, this is a super valuable keyword. SEO team, let's go get this search term and try and rank for it organically, because when we rank for it in paid search, we get a lot of ROI from that." That's going to make it harder, absolutely.

Potentially, it means more noise in these keyword research numbers. That noise could come from the inclusion of more close variance in the data. We'll see how that happens. That potentially muddies the research and prioritization process for us. It might be the case that this is already happening though.

What Can We Do?

There are a few things we can do. We're not powerless. We do have some ability to influence this. First off, any time you're doing keyword research I now suggest that you just can't rely on AdWords alone. It's not good enough. You've got to be using at the very least something like Google Suggest. I love the tool SEMrush. I love keywordtool.io. I think those are both excellent.

1) Google Suggest

Google Suggest, for example, when I start typing "fish sauce," knowing that I'm in Seattle if I am geo located, it'll show me some things. It did show me fish sauce Seattle, fish sauce Portland. Portland, I think, was actually higher than Seattle. I guess we're looking for fish sauce from Portland more so. It showed me fish sauce chicken wings, which is particularly popular around here and delicious. It showed me fish sauce uses, nutrition, fish sauce versus oyster sauce.

These were not things that I got on my suggested list. Granted, I didn't go through all 800 or so suggested keywords, but a few of these were very different from what I saw over here. I think AdWords tends to be very focused on commercial intent terms, things that they know people are trying to buy or do some sort of commercial activity around. So it is valuable for advertisers.

A lot of this is more informational searches, which is huge for content marketers, huge for bloggers, big for anyone who's doing SEO to try and attract awareness, brand attention, links to their site, those kinds of things. So you can't ignore these keywords.

The other thing that's very nice is if you do these, you can do them geo modified or non-geo modified, and if you do them, they tend to be in popularity order. That means I know that "fish sauce chicken wings" is probably a more popular search term in Seattle right now than "fish sauce uses." Also fascinating useful information. I can rank some of that stuff against the numbers that I'm seeing over here and try and compare and contrast.

It's not always perfect, by the way. Sometimes they over geo modify, or people in your search area are searching a little differently from how the rest of the world is searching, whatever the case may be. There are a lot of temporal factors going on here. So if all of a sudden there's a fish sauce food truck that opens up in Seattle, that might get super popular in the search terms even though it's not very popular anywhere else.

2) Google Analytics/Adwords

A second thing you can do is follow up directly inside of your Google Analytics or AdWords to see which specific, unique exact terms sent traffic and how that performed. Unlike organic search, where Google's taken away 95%, 97% of all keyword referral data, that referral data does still exist in GA and in AdWords. It doesn't appear that this change will mean that Google will take sauces for fish and report it as fish sauce in your campaign. It looks like they'll still be reporting the actual keyword that sent traffic, and so you can infer from that this prioritization importance process.

3) Bing/Yahoo! Referrals

Number three, you can actually use Bing and Yahoo or any search engine that is still reporting referral data. Approximately 5% of Google's keyword data is still being reported. You can use those referrals to help infer relative quantities and relative performance on a per keyword basis at least for your most important keywords. For stuff in the long tail and the chunky middle, it's going to be harder, maybe even impossible in the long tail. But at the head of the demand curve at least you can say, "Yes, Thai fish sauce doesn't perform quite as well as Vietnamese fish sauce for us. It turns out Vietnamese fish sauce really gets us the great quality traffic that we're looking for. We'll focus on that one first."

4) Broaden Your Keyword Targeting

I think because of all of this keyword data removal, just in general we have to almost become more like Google Hummingbird, the update, around how we do keyword and intent matching, a little less towards the exact phrase, exact match keyword targeting, and a little more towards the intent of the searcher and all of their potential interests and intent around that. We need to serve a wider set of potential search visitors with the actual content on our pages.

That's going to be a challenge too. But basically we can say, "Hey, how can we group this stuff into content for SEO that's going to make for a meaningful, useful searcher experience and potentially has that ability to rank for all of these different combinations of terms that are closely aligned in intent?" That's kind of where we're going broadly with search, keywords, and keyword research and targeting.

All right, everyone, I apologize that Google keeps taking more and more useful and functional data and power tools away from us. I wish there were more that I could do to stop them from doing that, but it's not my place. Hopefully, this will help out your processes.

I'm sure there'll be some great comments and suggestions in the comments around other things people are doing and can do. We should all get ready for this change. I hope we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

I'm really glad you cited the Hummingbird effect in the third point. In fact - a part all the more or less conspiranoiac reasons that may have Google decided to quit the exact match keyword operator in Keyword Planner - we should remember how Hummingbird seems working in simplyfing search queries, and Hummingbird is affecting everything in Google Search, also Adwords.

Remember, then, to use the inverse keyword research option. Instead of being us typing the keywords we want to know the data of, we tell Google to suggest us what keywords it extrapolate as meaningful from an URL we submit. More over: we should pay attention on how Google groups those suggested keywords, because that offers us a hint of how Google relates them together, which is extremely useful if we think semantically. And that's why it is extremely useful using as URLs from where Google suggests keywords, the ones of the competitors performing well in the SERPs (or - as Dan Shure once suggested in a post) even Wikipedia pages about the "topic" we want to rank for.

Ah!... and remember to verify things like trends and seasonality using Google Trends (this is especially true if you do International SEO).

Great info From Rand. My question for Gianluca is, you talked about the inverse keyword relationship in your comments. Can the ayto-complete suggestions be one of the inputs while doing keyword research? I'm saying this because that would also show up according to the trends persistent at that very time period. Close variants are something which would affect the way we optimize & after Hummingbird, which has the ability to semantically interpret search queries, this is going to be really challenging. What are your thoughts Gianluca?

I am not sure I understood you well; when you talk about autocomplete suggestions, do you mean Google Suggests?

If it is so, I strongly rely on them,as Rand himself said in the WBF.

More over, especially if I'm working on sites that relies on specifically localized audiences (for instance a classified site that relies on geographic taxonomy), I take care of doing the Google suggests analysis logged off and having set with the Mozbar as many Google Search Profiles as are the locations targeted, so to check out if Google presents different suggestions based on specific locations and so discovering what people in New York, Los Angeles, Chcago or Seattle search. Obviously, many suggests will the same, but I noticed that we can discover different nuances about the user intentions this way.

Unfortunately, this is something that no keyword suggest tools offer, as they limit the discovery to generically not-localized Googles (or "normalized" neutral SERPs).

Yes Gianluca. You got it right. But what do you think about keyword in Rand White board " Sauces for fish"? That still has searches. I think Google uses search patterns for every digital footprint like IP addresses. So the auto suggest can be misleading too at times. What are your thoughts on this Gianluca & Rand. ?

For keyword research I always use keywordtool.io to get the autocomplete suggestions. Download the full list, then check the search volumes in AdWords Keyword Planner, and the more popular ones in Google Trends. I often find very useful long tail keywords with keywordtool.io.

As Google's semantic Search tech improves, evidenced by Hummingbird, their suggestions become ever-closer to match the user's intent. Matching a single user's intent is always a gamble, because it depends heavily on an individual's own wordy prowess, how well they can express themselves. Using aggregate data to "crowd-source" keyword research is a much safer bet. Seeing data about popularity, and clicks to lists of Phrases and Related terms enables one to apply insight into intent to select and apply the keyphrases. That is the role of an SEO or PPC pro, is it not? Thanks for mentioning SEMrush, Rand.

The only thing changing is the advanced setting in the campaign settings tab, Keyword Types. The default settings was to include plural forms, misspellings and other relevant terms for exact and phrase match.

Now the pure "exact match" will be gone, and for about 95 % of all Google AdWords account out there, it will not be an issue, as they have not used the pure "exact match" functionality.

It is not good that the option of using exact match will be gone, but if Google's statistics show that the option is obsolete, there is nothing we can do about it.

I manage an Adwords campaign with a set of important exact match keywords, and a good few of these are actually typos or slight variations on the main product keywords for my client. I don't see this change as the total loss of exact match as a keyword bidding option... it'll hopefully just mean that the common typos and plurals won't need to be added individually, as before.

The time-consuming work coming up for a PPC manager running such a campaign will be analysing the differences (clicks/cost/impressions/CTR etc) between the single exact match keyword that now brings in close variants, against the performance under the previous system. If there's a big difference then there's a chance it's become too fuzzy with what Google considers 'close variants' and we'll have an issue, but that remains to be seen.

"Average monthly searches ("Avg. monthly searches"): The average number of times people have searched for the exact keyword based on the location and Search Network targeting that you've selected. We average the number of searches for the term over a 12-month period."

Thanks Dan! I thought for a minute I had missed some announcement on a change to this policy. As I recall, Google took away the ability of the user to select for which match type to see search volume data (broad, phrase, exact) when they came out with the Keyword Planner tool. Now the data is exclusively for exact match.

With this update, you no longer have to build exhaustive lists of misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords to get the coverage you want. Instead, focus on adding negative keywords--including close variants you don’t want to match for--to shape traffic and reduce cost. This can improve your campaigns’ ROI and help deliver a better ad experience for your customers. You can learn more about the benefits of negative keywords in our new keyword white paper.

So yes, they still call it "exact match," but no, it doesn't mean the same thing as it used to. If Google considers a word/phrase to be a "close variant" or "misspelling" of what you've entered, they'll group them together. Exact just isn't "exact" anymore.

It seems they are saying the search volume numbers are in fact for that exact keyword - which is different than how they trigger ads. Close variants will trigger ads from appearing. But the volume data is for the exact keyword.

The AdWords article seems to be all about ad trigger, not the volume numbers displayed? http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/08/close-variant-matching-for-all-exact.html

The switch is supposed to happen in "late September" according to Google's piece we both linked to. At that time, we'll get to see what changed, but even in the meantime, it's my understanding that the estimates for volume (which have never been precise) will now be including close variants as that's now what the phrase "exact match" means. As I noted in the video, though, those estimates are often so far off that it's hard to know what they've included until now (sometimes they feel more like Google's estimated count of search results than anything else).

Translate of google gives as synonym of the word "modified" among others the word "alter".

https://translate.google.com/#en/el/modified

The issue here is if the Google dictionary, or the way that Google interpretes the words, gives as close variant of the exact phrase [altered flour] the phrase "modified flour", or even the phrase "genetically modified flour" or "genetically altered flour" the same meaning. The thing is that every word in the local language (eg german) may have been interpreted in the english language with such closed variants. In this case, some phrases that have been translated from the local language (of a website) into the english one, may trigger search results or ads which are not the ones of the real meaning of the keywords used in the above websites.

Actually Google is not removing Exact match in AdWords, that's a misunderstanding.

What they will do is this: till now for Exact and Phrase match there have been two options:

Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants (default)

Do not include close variants

What will happen by the end of September is that the option "Do not include close variants" will disappear. Thats about it. My experience is that 95% of AdWords users never changed the default setup so nothing really changes.

This AdWords setting is exactly what I was thinking. I assume there are no plans to remove these settings though. So we can still do "exact match" without variants. Only difference is that we have an option to do it with or without variants. Right?

I'm sorry but I think we are wrong. I just reread the announcement. It says "For advertisers that opted out, the option to disable close variants will be removed in September.". So we WILL be losing this option. In late September Google is taking away the ability for us to enable or disable variants.

See announcement: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/08/close-variant-matching-for-all-exact.html

Honestly, I don't see this change in AdWords as all that debilitating. It really means PPC managers have to stay on top of their negative keyword list. Sure, the keyword numbers won't be as accurate in Google Keyword Planner, but I've always taken those numbers with a grain of salt anyway (even for exact match).

One method I use to capture more relevant traffic is to follow my content in Analytics as to the most traffic'd pages as a result of search. (not referrals or social or even links) For example this article post on "Help, My Mattress is Sagging" which was created specifically for the long tail of what any potential consumer might enter into their search has consistently been a top traffic'd page for my site. I then analyze the SERP appearance, keyword set (keyword density, alt tgs etc.) and then say okay - this set of keywords are highly relevant time and again to my audience =

Make more content around these terms and of course then.... measure+learn+adapt+build+measure....

Despite Yahoo & Bing differing audiences then Google its still a good indication of % of traffic per keyword - I still look to analytics for this info as a guide as to whats going well for me "Are the keywords I want showing up" and surprise I'm getting found for "X keyword" - go build on that if I want more of that.

The title seems disingenuous and misleading on the part of Moz--other marketing news sources are equally as guilty. This seems very similar to what happened when query data was removed from paid search. Think back to the titles that read "(not provided) coming to paid search!", etc.

A title and first line of the video might lead people to believe that, after September, they will only see phrase and broad match in the match type dropdown. We aren't losing exact match in its current default form; close variants were included by default already. We are losing the option to remove close variants. It sucks but that doesn't give a blank check to sensationalize.

I do find it somewhat misleading that Google will keep the exact match name. It might be worthwhile for Google to rethink the descriptors they current use for their match types.

I believe the only reason why Google did this was to improve their revenue, flat out. It removed the ability to be surgical in your bidding and tight with your spend, now you have to omit dozens of keywords that are under-performing and bid higher for less specific terms since the spend and advertisers just doubled for those term sets.

However, Google is a business that provides a service, they are well within their rights to do that.

I'm almost of the mindset that the best way to get hard data on keyword exposure is to write a very long winded article about a topic and just see what impression data rolls in. From there you can re-target and re-write the content for it. It seems to work well for me.

Testing is the key Alan without question - research best keyword set (longer the tail the better) and implement. Best point though is yes - Google is a for profit business and the almighty $ is their 1st priority.

I just found that Google had directions on changing ones settings within Adwords to include only Exact Match instead of Close Variants within Adwords. They removed it following this Whiteboard Friday but the cached page is still live. You can see screenshots and more info on this below (if you don't mind the link). I think this Whiteboard Friday had a big effect on them.

It just shows to me that they're attacking SEO's once more and removing the option is not even doing a service to their Adwords customers but instead they're forcing a policy on paying customers which is to affect SEOs.

It appears that they're messing about with the Organic results as well. While doing some research on competitors' sites that moved up or down following Panda, I found this: (site:supremeoptimization.com "los angeles seo"), on one competitor's site. The results show three pages including their homepage. The latter two pages have the EM term in title or content but the homepage doesn't anywhere in content or code on either the live or cached page as far as I could find. Usually when nothing is found they tell you or offer the same search without quotes. In this case Google is showing a page that doesn't have the EM term (which I specifically searched for) but rather one they find relevant to the EM term. Anyone have any thoughts or info on this?

When you do a search for EM in Adwords they give you the new variant count but if you begin using negative keywords that are logically going to be in that group of close variants they don't change the number of Avg. Monthly Searches. Try it; I added in as many extremely close variations and it didn't budge the number. This is outright misleading.

All of this while they state in the popup [?] box next to Avg. Monthly Searches that:

"The average number of times people have searched for this exact keyword based on the date range and targeting settings that you've selected".

So what is Google? Are you doing EM or not?

Well they must have their attorneys writing site copy now because the devil's in the details. Their idea of a valid definition of Exact Match is:

"With exact match, your ads can appear only when someone searches for your exact keyword, without any other terms in the search. We'll also show your ad when someone searches for close variations of that specific keyword".

Am I wrong in thinking that adding negative keywords (to stop google from bidding on them) will now be the absolute best practice for PPC? Monitoring what you're getting traffic from and negating the useless keywords.

I’m Agree with this “This will almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of more revenue for Google” and "I think AdWords tends to be very focused on commercial intent terms"

I don’t understand sometime about Monthly Search volume because many keywords are too competitive and people are using those keywords in regular but Google says Low Search volume, Can you please clear my doubt on this? Why this happening ?

I'm Always using Long tail keywords and without Exact match for Website Optimization because when i check my analytics i'm getting Click from Log tail keywords not short and it is very useful in content quality, keywords density and getting rank on Too many keywords.

I'm always using geo target when I research keywords for every client. Thanks

Übersuggest is also a great tool that basically takes Google Suggest to the next level.

You plug in your keyword and it essentially delivers the same information and shows you many options for more longtail terms. It takes your base term and adds a letter or a digit in front of it, and extracts suggestions for it.

You can also choose a language and a source. Übersuggest can get suggestions either from regular Web search or from search verticals like Shopping, News or Video.

But my question is what is the best way to analyse the keywords. Because in most of the time , every one is using the tool and select the keyword on the basis of search count & competition and remove the good keyword which have good for the websites.

As you said that go with Google suggestion , Yes I analyse the keywords as per Google suggestion select the keyword from Google suggestion and check the keyword could and density of that keyword . from these I will collect the keywords which have good potencial. and get the good collection of the website

So can you please let me how what is the best method for the keyword research???.

Thanks for clarifying Rand. The removal of exact match is not a anticipated move from Google and I am sure that I will not benifit PPC marketers. The exact match gives us the opportunity to precisely buy ads triggered by a special keyword search that was due to a special mindset from the searcher.

If I can see that my CPA are very low on a exact match keyword, I know which word or phrase that is working for me. How can I optimize, if I am fighting in the blind, not getting the full picture of the searchers intent?

I know that search is not that simple, but a exact match keyword is easily identified if it is in the later stages of a purchase funnel or if it is just a overview informative search.

That has a huge effect on CPA campaigns and remarketing keyword research.

I wonder what will be the next major removal from Google. A complete move over to a Google only information SERP on certain queries? (e.g. like the football world championship match scores seen during the summer).

So, if I look at my reports by Keyword Match Type showing me which broad, phrase or exact match types are getting clicks or conversions... how does this affect the way I should set up my ad rotations based on clicks or conversions?

For example, with an ad say that my cost per conversion is more for broad searches than it is phrase searches but my clicks for phrases searches are better then broad searches. If I wanted clicks, I would only use phrase and not broad. If I optimize that ad to be rotated based on conversions its automatically choosing a broad match type because that's what is working better than phrase or exact. But what if I don't like what I'm paying for that conversion and I don't want that ad to be rotated for conversions or be paying for phrase or exact impressions, clicks and conversions if they aren't producing - Adwords will just throw them out there anyways?

What if that same ad was optimized for clicks, and even if I had less overall conversions, but the cost of that conversion was less then the same ad optimized for conversions, couldn't that be more profitable in the long run?

So I guess what I'm asking is.. which could be more useful... less clicks and more conversions at a higher cost, or more clicks and less conversions at a lower cost - that still get people to my site that I can still convert, but also engage and retarget

Great explanation. But I am a little confused of the exact match fall away because I work at my agency for SEA and SEO. When I exclude keywords from my PPC campaign they still have automatically the exact match format - how can that be if it's not working any more? I know it's a PPC question but it is a kind of paradox for me.

Well, my follow-up question would be this: Have you ever noticed that there are many terms on "Google Suggest" which return zero monthly searches on "AdWords Keyword Tool"? Which of those two data would I follow in those cases? the one which says me "yes, people look for this, that's why I am suggesting it to you", or the one which says "nobody looks for that"?

"We will live up to our "don't be evil" principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results" except for Google Adwords Search Campaigns :) anyway, both adwords and not provided can be the searcher intent focus of Google, which is not bad, in a broader sense .. thats my thought, but it may be 100% wrong

You are always writing great articles. Truly telling, what ever I've learned from my training institute, but I learned more from reading your regular posts. You are my idol. This post I think the best keyword research idea ever.Google auto suggestion is fantastic tool if any one can use it properly.From my recent activities, I am using it very often and getting result so fast.Another tool is yahoo auto suggestion every one can follow it and can make new and unique topic it is also fantastic indeed.

You had me with the stillshot from the video - suddenly thought the WBF budget had been given a major boost...

I personally think the main point has to be the the 4th of Rand's suggestions for moving forward. Building content that targets a segment of a topic, rather than a single keyword, a page you can be proud to show off, is the long-term plan. Weaving in known synonyms and closely related variations it makes sense to talk about at the same time, and expanding content into further pages within the topic that merit their own resource etc. all adds to the keyword variations (both medium and long-tail) you can have fun targeting.

It's a lot more work of course, and you need to spend more time digging for keywords on the topic, but I feel that's just part of the modern SEO process. Google Suggest is a great place to generate these ideas. Keyword.io as Rand suggested is very helpful for this (and my favourite at the moment, but there are others like Ubersuggest and SEOChat's tool (if you'll forgive this, wrote about getting started with these here if that helps anyone).

As for Google's motivation, it may only be 5% of users who use true exact match, but if that 5% include many of power users who control big campaigns, that's less of a minor figure. The PPC folks I work with make big use of exact match as part of their campaign blend to control spend & ROI.

I've just realised something that could be potentially very damaging for advertisers as well as Google themselves: if Google considers brand/competitor names as close variants...

Remember the Interflora debacle from a few years back? Even though Interflora took legal action (and won) again M&S for bidding on "interflora" as a keyword, I immediately found a case where Interflora themselves were bidding on their competitors as well, whether accidentally or on purpose - they probably had "flowers" as a broad or phrase match keywords.

Back then, making sure that everything was exact match was the only way to avoid this. But now? Anything's game. You could have exact match and a ton of negative keywords and you could still accidentally bid on a competitor's name, simply because Google may consider it a close variant (especially if it's a rather generic name, e.g. Nice Flowers Ltd).

I'd be interested to know who would actually land the blame. If an advertiser bids on "interflora" as a keyword, they're 100% responsible. If it's "flowers" (phrase/broad) and "interflora flowers" shows an ad, the advertiser would probably still get the blame because it's their responsibility to include "interflora" as a negative. But surely no court would rule against an advertiser if they didn't include every single competitor name as a negative - that's just unrealistic and might even be impossible. So I wonder if Google themselves would land the blame instead...? Whatever the case, the coming months should be interesting...

Google is following the models of authoritarian states. Make more money and have more control by limiting others. At the end, they have only shot themselves in the foot for the long run in favor of short term success!

I tend to agree David. It was especially pathetic during the whole authorship decline ordeal of the past year. The whole point of handing over all that data to Google was the fact that we were receiving something back, in the form of author photos. Then they took that away from us, but still wanted all of the data. Then all of the experts were like "authorship is still great, keep using it, give Google whatever they want..". Then Google killed it.

We're not Google's partners - so there is nothing we can say/do that matters. If we all go on strike starting tomorrow Google won't feel a thing - actually they might feel something .. it's called joy. :P

While I'd love to do more to help David, I don't think that's where my time/energy/effort can be best spent. I do hope that lobbying bodies like the advertising associations, SEMPO, etc. do their work on behlaf of the field, and I'd like to nudge more mainstream journalists and publications to question Google, too, but my work's best spend helping marketers make sense of and optimize the world we've got. Perhaps in some future career, I can devote more energy to these causes.

Yes, Google is taking away another powerful tool for the SEO agencies, but we will survive. Remember last year when the (not provided) grew to near 100%? We all survived that.

Google is just yet again pushing us to create valuable, enjoyable content for our visitors.Without knowing the exact match keyword data, we may be limited to the amount of data we can find on the short tail keywords. It leads us to find more interesting, "humming birdesk" long tail subjects. As a content creator and a reader I don't have a serious problem with that.

On the other hand, as a AdWords manager, this is a serious blow.

Thanks for the post Rand. I have to admit I was a little disappointed there wasn't an actual video of you playing "Rando Calrissian".

I don't think so. It's not really much of a war since Google basically holds all the cards - the searchers, the data, and the power to do as they like unchecked by anyone (save, on occassion, the EU). It's Google's world, and until a worthy competitor comes along, we're obligated to find ways to work within it.

What Google giveth, Google taketh away! It's like when they went to "not provided" keyword data in Google Analytics. Yeah, the information is still kinda there if you squint your eyes enough, but they certainly made it a lot harder to pull any real useful information out of the noise.

And yet, if more people did use Bing, perhaps Google wouldn't have such monopolistic power to drive these kinds of advertiser & marketer-unfriendly changes (or else they'd risk losing ad budget to a competitor).

Whatever the motives behind Google's recent removal of exact-match keyword?!!? That is funny. As someone who has studied 10's of millions of PPC visitors and can set up keyword campaigns and landing pages to a granular level with the precision of a Sniper. They are taking control out of the marketers hand and placing control in their hands. It is painfully obvious that Google is out of control with greed.

I maintain that we old timers created the success of Google and if when can unite we can certainly put a dent in their bottom line. [Pure greed]

Good info Rand. I especially like how suggested terms change based on location. For better keyword research with Google Suggest, I found you can change your Geo location (Google.com => Search Tools) and get varying results by changing your locale. This can be super helpful for targeting multiple or specific regions terminology.

So you can set your keywords to exact or phrase, at least in my interface -- is that going away?

When doing SEO research, I prefer phrase and largely focusing on head terms, while geomodifying the terms based on rationality (where are you located really) and search volume (ok, that's cool you live in Mobile, but you advertise out to Pensacola and they're much larger and relatively close).

I feel this is continuing in the ZMOT vein of "stop worrying about specific search terms and worry about getting customers." It's a little counter-intuitive, but like white-on-white text we're just going to have to unlearn. And that unlearning will also mean we won't have to think "well is [red bank nj comic shop] or [comic shop red bank nj] or [red bank comic shop] or [comic shop red bank] more searched? wait what about [red bank nj comics shop]?" when i'm doing SEO keyword research. Enjoy the liberation.

PPC, sure -- you're directly paying for each click and while I've never seen an issue I can easily foresee situations where it could be an issue. For SEO? It's continuing the ZMOT philosophy that Google has quit harping on but is still guiding the whole enterprise.

Yes - you can still set [Exact Match] in Adwords. The challenge is that this no longer means what it once did, and now includes (by default, with no way to shut it off) close variants and misspellings. For those power users who understood and could measure these differences, it requires much more sophistication around negative keywords and additional challenges with targeting and expectations on the SEO side (as described in the video).

Fantastic white board Friday as always. One day Google will give us back something helpful though I suspect they don't really want to make SEO any easier. Quick question you mention Moz's (great) keyword checker which also has search numbers including exact. How is this extrapolated? when I mean is, is this going to be incorrect with the new update too?

I really think this is a case of Google figuring out ways in which they can drive more revenue through Adwords. I don't do a lot of PPC work anymore but I would love to know from the people that do PPC if their CPC performance and conversation rate has improved after this change was made.

This is great stuff and all SEO's can relate to the fact that keyword research is one of the most important parts of the processes. I think that this displayed that as Bruce Lee stated "do not limit yourself to one style" in other words using all the tools possible and making the best judgement is the way to go. Although exact match may of provided a person great results Google was not providing true and through data with that so this adjustment can be both a positive or negative change as you said depending on how you go about it.

Also Gianluca Fiorelli mentioned utilizing other sources such as Trends which is a great tool, Bing keyword tool, and other free or paid for options, but at the end of the day it all comes down to an educated guess from the data which needs to come from all different sources.

My experience has been that the data in WMTools is not trustworthy. It can be approximately accurate sometimes, but it's so inconsistent and seems to be both sampled and somewhat randomized. The professional SEOs I know who study it closely don't use it for anything other than a rough secondary signal.

From google's point of view, it seems to me this is a win-win for both ppc and seo. for ppc, they make more money by making us pay more to get the same conversions. for seo, they withhold exact match keyword data so folks doing keyword research cannot just cherry pick the top 10 keywords in their niche to spam their site with. they have to focus more on topics rather than keywords and write more naturally which we already know is what they want us to do.

I think that's exactly right Takeshi - they have said that by removing some of the power options, they can bias AdWords to be more simple for users. I'd argue they're wrong, and that removing options and data for power users is inherently worse, and there's plenty of UI/UX ways to make AdWords simpler without removing functionality, but this is the route they've gone, so now we need to recalibrate and react.

I'm with Rand on this one. The great majority of big spend on Google AdWords are from companies that have PPC experts. I don't see this as a UX / UI change as much as it's a way to limit the precision of bidding and to increase the number of searches that contain paid ad results. If 50% of your spend goes to exact match, and suddenly you are pushing it into phrase or broad match terms you are going to heavily increase the likelihood that an ad will be served where it may have not been.

It seems that Google's changes over the past year or so, is limiting what we can actually do to affect our budget and specific targeting.

Am guessing the use of negative keywords can help get closer to exact match keywords??

As for the 5% of google searches that show up in Google Analytics, that actually means that the big boys are still able to identify trends and analyse keywords since 5% is more than enough if your traffic amounts to millions per day! Is this the reason google is allowing 5%?? maybe just to keep the big fish happy!!

Glad to hear you were intrigued by the post, but the post was actually a transcript of a video. Your comments are likely to get fewer thumbs down if they don't appear to be a generic comment that could apply to most any post.